L. Acadia
Dr. L. Acadia is an Assistant Professor of Literary Theory at National Taiwan University
Supervisors: Daniel Boyarin, Pamela Sue Anderson, and John Connolly
Supervisors: Daniel Boyarin, Pamela Sue Anderson, and John Connolly
less
InterestsView All (30)
Uploads
November, 2020
Behind the Headlines is a series hosted by the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Institute in partnership with the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanites at Columbia University.
April 2020
• Lilith Acadia (National Taiwan University, Taiwan)
• Susan Arndt (Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies, University of Bayreuth, Germany)
• Jane Hiddleston (Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Oxford, UK)
• Saul Nelson (Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, UK)
November 2020.
Dr. Acadia is a former Marie Skłodowska-Curie Cofund Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Taiwan University. She is also involved in the Hublic Sphere, a podcast series created and produced by early career researchers in the Trinity Long Room Hub.
The Rethinking Democracy Podcast is produced by the Trinity Long Room Hub in partnership with the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. Find out more about the Rethinking Democracy Podcast here: www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/…mocracy-podcast.php
December 2020
Keywords: queer literature, Taiwanese literature, love, imperialism, canon, modernisms, bicycling
Translated by 黃冠維 and 張容禎
推想小說(speculative fiction)中的智慧家園(smart homes)面貌,從不祥的險惡威脅到維護生命的策略,在在揭露我們對科學的期望與恐懼:人們夢想人工智慧(AI)帶來的可能性,但也害怕這種科技帶來的危險。我們可以在這些敘事中發現各種概念構想上的破綻,以之為契機重新思考我們對智能、倫理和動機的預設。
Like the unmapped globe, the individual has no borders until identity categories delineate political lines dividing up what was previously a unique, unified whole. Gloria Anzaldúa describes this imposition of borders on an intact “me,” whom “[o]nly your labels split.” The labels are imprecise, ill-fitting identity categories of gender, race, class, and politics that belong to someone else. She rejects the suggestion that such an identity assemblage makes her “confused” or “[a]mbivalent,” because the borders are foreign to her otherwise unbroken self: label confusion does not imply identity confusion. Identity categories are the kinds of concepts that those with political and epistemic power use to draw borders on individuals and maps, to impose distinctions and hierarchies suiting their objectives, to “create worlds” with words to “order dominant discourses,” as Timothy Fitzgerald explains. The powerful can then apply those concepts and the worlds they create to discursively justify their beliefs: repeated enough, the words and their worlds begin to sound natural, and then epistemically powerful, so that audiences trust the speakers who invoke those words and believe the knowledge from those conceptual worlds. ‘Religion’ is one powerful example of such a word that creates a naturalized category whose epistemic privilege makes it, as Barack Obama and Frederick Douglass observe in the epigraphs, a dangerous weapon.
Celebrating the recent swell of Butler scholarship based on the Huntington’s archive and renewed interest in the published corpus, Canavan encourages further scholarship and reading: "We’ve still only scratched the surface of what’s contained in the archive; there’s still so much more to explore." Lilith Acadia (co-editor with Ji Hyun Lee of Octavia Butler’s Afrofuturistic Visions, forthcoming from Lexington Books) interviewed Canavan about religion in Butler's corpus, and is sharing the interview with the goal of encouraging such emerging work.
Viewable online at https://tif.ssrc.org/2019/06/10/martha-mary-meister-eckhart/
November, 2020
Behind the Headlines is a series hosted by the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Institute in partnership with the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanites at Columbia University.
April 2020
• Lilith Acadia (National Taiwan University, Taiwan)
• Susan Arndt (Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies, University of Bayreuth, Germany)
• Jane Hiddleston (Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Oxford, UK)
• Saul Nelson (Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, UK)
November 2020.
Dr. Acadia is a former Marie Skłodowska-Curie Cofund Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Taiwan University. She is also involved in the Hublic Sphere, a podcast series created and produced by early career researchers in the Trinity Long Room Hub.
The Rethinking Democracy Podcast is produced by the Trinity Long Room Hub in partnership with the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. Find out more about the Rethinking Democracy Podcast here: www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/…mocracy-podcast.php
December 2020
Keywords: queer literature, Taiwanese literature, love, imperialism, canon, modernisms, bicycling
Translated by 黃冠維 and 張容禎
推想小說(speculative fiction)中的智慧家園(smart homes)面貌,從不祥的險惡威脅到維護生命的策略,在在揭露我們對科學的期望與恐懼:人們夢想人工智慧(AI)帶來的可能性,但也害怕這種科技帶來的危險。我們可以在這些敘事中發現各種概念構想上的破綻,以之為契機重新思考我們對智能、倫理和動機的預設。
Like the unmapped globe, the individual has no borders until identity categories delineate political lines dividing up what was previously a unique, unified whole. Gloria Anzaldúa describes this imposition of borders on an intact “me,” whom “[o]nly your labels split.” The labels are imprecise, ill-fitting identity categories of gender, race, class, and politics that belong to someone else. She rejects the suggestion that such an identity assemblage makes her “confused” or “[a]mbivalent,” because the borders are foreign to her otherwise unbroken self: label confusion does not imply identity confusion. Identity categories are the kinds of concepts that those with political and epistemic power use to draw borders on individuals and maps, to impose distinctions and hierarchies suiting their objectives, to “create worlds” with words to “order dominant discourses,” as Timothy Fitzgerald explains. The powerful can then apply those concepts and the worlds they create to discursively justify their beliefs: repeated enough, the words and their worlds begin to sound natural, and then epistemically powerful, so that audiences trust the speakers who invoke those words and believe the knowledge from those conceptual worlds. ‘Religion’ is one powerful example of such a word that creates a naturalized category whose epistemic privilege makes it, as Barack Obama and Frederick Douglass observe in the epigraphs, a dangerous weapon.
Celebrating the recent swell of Butler scholarship based on the Huntington’s archive and renewed interest in the published corpus, Canavan encourages further scholarship and reading: "We’ve still only scratched the surface of what’s contained in the archive; there’s still so much more to explore." Lilith Acadia (co-editor with Ji Hyun Lee of Octavia Butler’s Afrofuturistic Visions, forthcoming from Lexington Books) interviewed Canavan about religion in Butler's corpus, and is sharing the interview with the goal of encouraging such emerging work.
Viewable online at https://tif.ssrc.org/2019/06/10/martha-mary-meister-eckhart/
What ideals for the future do AI narratives express? Or to use Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyung Kim’s term, how do we read the “sociotechnical imaginaries” of AI in speculative fiction? What shame from the past do these texts evoke? Kanta Dihal reads AI revolts in literature as slave narratives of “enslaved minds,” engaging the debate over whether humans should maintain dominance over machines, or engender respect for other intelligences and even grant rights to AI as Eileen Hunt Botting hopes, writing “passed down through cultures, humanity is an artificial form of collective emotional intelligence.”
Should we fear singularity or welcome AI as other creatures? What innovations (technological or otherwise) should we strive to bring from literature into our lives? What is literature’s potential for guiding development of AI? How might a country like Taiwan integrate literature into the curriculum training the next generation of developers to strengthen the semiconductor industry? Or if the AI of speculative fiction are, as Lee Worth Bailey argues, merely “human dreamlike analogies projected onto clockwork puppets in an unconscious fairy tale,” then what do these projections say about their human authors? What are geographic, temporal, or linguistic differences in depictions of AI? What would it mean to queer AI? What are the utopian imaginings of SF machine futures?
This panel invites submissions reflecting diverse critical approaches, geographical areas, and historical eras, from ancient proto-AI (e.g. The Mahāvastu, Apollonius Rhodius’s Argonautika, Lie Yukou’s Liezi), through early speculative fiction (e.g. Edmund Spenser's “The Faerie Queene,” Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam’s L'Ève future, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein), and classic SF (e.g. Karel Čapek’s R.U.R., Isaac Asimov’s “Multivac” stories, Anne McCaffrey’s The Ship Who Sang), to contemporary literature (e.g. Nnedi Okorafor’s “Mother of Invention,” Becky Chambers’s A Closed and Common Orbit, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun).
What tools from critical theory are useful for scholarship in political theology, or more generally for thinking in new ways about the connections between religion and politics? Are there keywords from the fields of feminist theory, queer theory, decolonial studies, Black studies, or Indigenous studies that could enrich discussions of political theology?
We invite proposals for brief essays (1500-2000 words) accompanied by annotated bibliographies that introduce keywords from Black studies, decolonial studies, queer theory, feminist theory, Indigenous studies, or other fields to political theology.
Obscenity! Blasphemy! Treason! Justifications for censorship imply that censored objects hold the power to subvert moral, religious, and civic good. The censor assumes that power, turning the censored object into a hidden hypothetical danger, whose excision from public view reinforces values and even realities the censor is protecting. This conference seeks to understand the power, interactions, and evolution of the censor, censored, and censorship. We welcome presentations addressing theoretical or actual censorship of a range of objects (e.g. text, sound, visual media, education, thought) and from across disciplines (e.g. literature, history, philosophy, film studies, art history, anthropology, politics, law).
Please send an abstract of your proposed presentation (200–300 words) and a brief bio to Dr. L. Acadia (acadia@ntu.edu.tw) by Sept 7, 2021.
This multidisciplinary conference on lesbians* and their pets* draws inspiration from women* (all terms inclusively defined) from history, literature, art, and theory whose relationships with non-human animals impacted their lives and love.
What roles do non-humans play in Sapphic stories? How might queer women’s relationships with non-human animals generate knowledge, impact other identities such as class and race, serve as a pretext to veil same-sex relationships, appear as a literary / musical / filmic / artistic trope, produce a lesbian aesthetic, or suggest lesbian futurity? We wonder also about the questions you may be asking, and look forward to hearing the stories that interest you!
Submissions may address these or other topics, taking the form of 15-20 minute talks (engaging discussion), workshops (may be longer), conversations, performances, or another form you suggest. We encourage pre-circulating papers or notes, and welcome artistic submissions.
Please send 200–300 word abstracts (or requests to attend) to the conference organisers, Dr. Lilith Acadia & Dr. Clare Tebbutt of Trinity College Dublin, via the conference email (SapphicPets@gmail.com) by 31 March, 2020. Please indicate any interest in contributing your written or artistic work to an anthology.
You can listen to the episode here:
https://soundcloud.com/tlrhub/tlrh-hublic-sphere-from-security-to-weaponization-the-power-of-citizenship
Held March 3–5, 2022, Online
Hosted by Dr L. Acadia, Department of Foreign Languages and Literature,
National Taiwan University, with funding from the Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology.
Organizing Committee: Dr Santiago Juan-Navarro (Florida International University) and Dr Greg Simons (Uppsala University).
Keynote: “Why Ban Books?” by Dr Emily Knox (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Plenary: “Living with Covid from/and China: A Taiwanese Immigrant on Endgames” by Prof. Sheng-mei Ma (Michigan State University)